The article is about the implications for marketing caused by the rise of social media which now finally seems to eliminate what we have known as business-to-business (B2B) and more or less merges B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C).

As discussed here on the blog several times starting way back in 2009 in the post Echoes in the Database a problem with B2B indeed is that while business transactions takes place between legal entities a lot of business processes are done between employees related to the selling and buying entities. You may call that employee-to-employee (E2E), people-to-people (P2P) or indeed human-to-human (H2H).

Related to databases, data quality and Master Data Management (MDM) this means we need real world alignment with two kinds of parties:

While B2B and B2C may melt together in the way we do messaging the distinction between B2B and B2C will be there in many other aspects. Even in social media we see it as for example two of the most used social networks being FaceBook and LinkedIn clearly belongs mainly to B2C and B2B respectively for marketing and social selling purposes.